Graze harvesting of mushrooms involves strategic harvesting of mushrooms from a bed of mushrooms in order to maximize crop yield. The process is significantly more complex than just harvesting the large size mushrooms. It also includes the identification and harvesting of smaller sized mushrooms in order to provide room for adjacent, larger mushrooms to grow to maximum size. This aspect is termed “separation” in the mushroom growing industry. The harvest strategy must also take into account the generational differences for the mushrooms in the bed such that there are consistently mushrooms available to harvest throughout the harvest process. This process is called “stagger”. Control of both separation and stagger is important for efficiently harvesting a harvesting bed on an ongoing basis.
Currently, graze harvesting of mushrooms is being conducted manually at mushroom farms. Differences in operator training and experience results in variation in the harvest results and reduces crop yield. Further, manual harvesting is typically conducted during a single 10 hour shift per day which implies that the mushrooms are allowed to grow in a more-or-less uncontrolled state over each night.
There are a few methods in the art that use cameras for locating and measuring cap diameters of mushrooms in a mushroom bed before harvesting the mushrooms with a mechanical picker. However, such methods do not provide for automatically selecting and picking mushrooms based on both separation and stagger. Camera-based apparatuses for locating and measuring mushrooms in a mushroom bed are described in, for example, NL 86/00887, U.S. Pat. No. 5,058,368, U.S. Pat. No. 5,471,827 U.S. Pat. No. 8,033,087 and U.S. 2005-0268587, the contents of each of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
There remains a need for automated methods and systems for harvesting mushrooms from a mushroom bed where both separation and stagger are automatically controlled.